


What's in a Name?

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 11:23:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4302933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Capable is kind to him in waking, which is good.</p><p>In dreams, kindness isn't much of anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's in a Name?

**Author's Note:**

> Fever dreams are a hell of a drug. Be warned, this gets fucky real fast.

There was no earthly way to explain his continued survival, no way to sugar-coat his continued failure to make it fully through those hallowed gates to take his place in the chrome halls. Nux continued to survive, though to what noble purpose he couldn’t even begin to imagine now.

In waking, he was a broken, burnt, agonized thing, kept in bed with forceful hands and sweet, gentle words. Capable tended to him herself often enough, her genuine kindness enough to soothe him into some semblance of peace. She was sweet to him, sweeter and more genuine in that sweetness than Nux had ever known a person could be.

He was Nux the Nut, the Nothing; Nux the Thrice Denied, three times throwing himself at the gates of Walhalla, looking to die noble in battle. He was a failure, worse than mediocre.

And yet Capable came to him, sweet and reassuring, cleaning the fever-sweat from his brow, telling impossible stories to distract and soothe. She treated him like he had worth he no longer could see in himself, and for the most part he was grateful, even if he couldn’t understand _why_ she did it.

The why didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was there. Nux needed her kindness in waking.

He needed her, because in sleep there was nothing.

No, not nothing. Nothing would have been better.

There was a silence so loud it was deafening, and there was a darkness so thick that it got under his eyelids and tore them open, screaming open, like drowning in thick mud - the very air stuck to his skin like a leather car seat on a sweaty day. He choked on a scream and breathed in a lungful of grit instead.

And he remembered, oh he remembered, the pain wouldn't let him forget. The pain drove away consciousness, drove away rationality, drove away hope, but it left the memories gruesome and intact. He remembered the look on his blood brother's face, and the terrible calm moment when he knew, he knew, and then the trigger had been pulled and the pain had shattered him. There was a moment when he could have moved, but he didn't. There was a moment when he could have thought, but he couldn't. Too shocked to think.

He had to do something. Something to give the women a chance. No option, no escape, roll the rig, go out grand…

He was desperate, sprawled broken and crying in the sand and unable to move, scream, think. He was desperate now, lost. Abandoned.

He’d been abandoned before. Left to die in the heat, to starve, to shrivel where there was no water.

That was before he had anyone to turn to. That was before he’d had the Immortan. That was before... before everything. Back then, all he’d had had run away like a ragged dust-colored ghost and left him, dead, tired, broken, bleeding in the middle of the desert.

“You traitored him,” Slit growls in his ear, trailing a knife down Nux’s side, shattering the silence in four simple syllables. “You traitored him and you _let me die_.”

There is no answering the allegation, no denying it. It’s true, isn’t it? So instead Nux says, “You should be in Walhalla,” but what he means is _it should have been you if it was one of us, should have been you you would have been smart enough to help them right._

Slit always knew what Nux liked and in life had loved to twist it, to give it to him while turning pleasure into a tangle of angry cursing, stinging pain, burning pleasure.  This moment was no different; Slit’s arms wrap around his middle, holding him as something begins to rip into his back, tearing through the skin. He arches his spine, trying to move closer to his blood brother and away from the agony, as he bares his crooked teeth in a snarl of pain.

There is no escaping, and his attempts only make the fire in his back worse. It’s only then that he realizes in horror that he was being sewn down to something, some hard surface on which Slit was forcing him.

When he stills, the fire raging along his spine died down to embers, and he can picture the threads that have punched through his back; they are thick and chromed, dripping with blood and shiny paint; they look like the staples on Slit’s cheeks made malleable.

Slit always claimed Nux was so much more attractive in pain; a compliment Nux had taken to heart. He liked the way Slit looked at him when Slit thought he looked fuckable; it was half the reason he threw himself into so many fights he didn’t belong in. He wanted the approval, _needed_ it. The low hiss of pain that escapes his lips isn’t an act, but he knows it’s delicious to Slit, and his eyes roll in pleasure and he murmurs something too softly to be heard as Slit drags the knife up his side in a second pass. 

The knife disappears and he slides his hands higher, caressing Nux’s neck for a moment before sitting up, hands wrapped around the slighter War Boy’s wrists before he loses balance. Forcing them up over his head, secure against the surface Nux is now sewn to, hard enough that the plank-like structure actually cracks against the rough wall. When he released them, they were sewn together and tied down to the boards.

Blood rolls down his arms from the new holes in his hands, and though he knows it will do him no good, he flexes against the stitching holding his palms together over his head. He shivers against the heavier body as Slit leans forward and runs his tongue over the trail of blood, He registers suddenly that it’s very hot, and knows that the tremor has nothing to do with the biting cold of the body pressed up against his own.

Nothing about him is contemptible now, nothing is irritating or bothersome. He isn’t the Nut, he isn’t Nothing. Like this, he’s perfect to at least one other person. Slit even enjoys the sound of his cursing.

And he _does_ curse, his legs (which had previously been straddling the thicker Boy’s hips) locking around Slit’s back as he lowered his mouth to Nux’s neck and glossed uneven teeth over the sensitive flesh. He curses his Brother, the pain, and from his lips the words are meant as encouragement and as endearments.

Slit know this, and Nux knows his role; he doesn't pull away or tell Slit to stop, he defies the logic his mind must scream at him and comes closer, growling if Slit pauses or move too far from him.

While his teeth worry Nux’s neck, first bruising and then bloodying the skin, Slit’s fingers map his stomach, finding the deepest of the cuts he’s made earlier. His skin, so desperately trying to undo the damage done to it, has already partially scabbed over and begun knitting together in implausibly fast growing proud flesh. Easily Slit breaks through it again, letting his cold hand slip into the heat of Nux’s soft flesh.

This is mad and desperate and bloody; it’s ugly and impossible and pointlessly painful. And it’s this that Slit loves about him. He loves Nux not as a person but for his eagerness, his lack of hesitation. When his hands aren't just on Nux’s body, but inside it, when he should be screaming for help but he instead just whines, breath coming in tight, fluttering gasps. He’s crying, tears drying in this awful heat before they can make it even halfway down his face.

He deserves it, this is what he’s owed for what he’s done to the Immortan’s world.

His bleeding only makes him want, need more; there’s a sick pleasure in the way Slit’s icy hand digs into his belly, pushing strong fingers carefully through flesh and torturously sliced muscle, until his bare fingers are feeling around Nux’s abdominal cavity.

In these dreams

_are they dreams or is the kindness a dream the soothing voice cool water on the brow things no one gave for free much less to a traitor a nothing_

it’s when he's screaming in an agony that between them had come to mean perfection, and he's right there on the cusp of death he'll never meet, that the world seems to at last find balance.

It was agony and it was exquisite. This is all he could ever want, a state of highest bliss; he gives himself, all that makes up his weak, traitorsome self, he gives it all up to Slit, leaving it to him to control this particular ride. It’s everything, but somehow it's never enough, and wasn’t that always the way. They had always pushed each other. They always snarled at one another, half tease and half bite, and they’d always end up fighting and hating each other later, only  to end up together this way more often than it seems possible.

It is not like the fevered dreams fed to him by an ill and hormone-driven, sex-obsessed mind when they were both barely old enough to do war. Nux’s health had never been great, and the fevers twisted things, fed him dangerous ideas when he first started feeling sexual desire – when he first decided he wanted Slit.

This is not like that. There is a level of closeness here, a passion and intimacy, the qualities of something almost like bonding that his rambling dreams could never have possessed. Slit brings him to the brink of death, to that point that's more intimate than simple sex would ever allow, and somehow despite the agony involved, Nux finds himself enjoying the way Slit tears into him.

After some time, they come crashing down together, both bloody and hot despite the freezing temperature radiating off Slit, who’s flopped down, stretched over Nux’s belly. It’s over now, or so Nux thinks, but in the way of dreams it can’t be that easy.

Tensing, he strains and he pulls against the threads holding him to that hard board, whole body firm against that heavier body as Slit’s hands leave his body. As the larger War Bot sits back, shifting his weight over Nux’s middle in a way the soon has him whimpering in confused agony, Slit slips his bloodied fingers gently, almost tenderly over the dome of Nux’s head. His hands slip down, so gentle Nux has to close his eyes, afraid that meeting Slit’s sharp gaze will trigger something angry and animal in him; this is sweet and though he deserves the agony, he _needs_ the kindness.

Without preamble, Slit’s cold hands are resting on the joint of Nux’s jaw and neck, and their mouths crash together again. It's brief, but slow and hot, and when he pulls away his breath comes heavily.

His breath.

It hisses and wheezes, and there is a stink suddenly, the stench of death-still-walking, and Nux’s eyes fly open to meet the eyes of the man he once called God.

“TRAITOR,” the Immortan booms, plunging a hand deep into the wound Slit carved earlier. His hand is fire, and deep inside, Nux feels it grip something, dragging, yanking it out of place. “MEDIOCRE THIEF – COULDN’T EVEN TURN COAT RIGHT.”

Nux cowers, agony and terror ripping through him. He feels something rip inside, pain, pain like nothing else, and then the Immortan is on him again, mask open, his kiss all teeth and forceful, probing tongue. His bloody hand clutches something as he drags it out of the hole in Nux’s side; when Nux tries to scream, it’s smothered by another rough kiss.

In panic, for the first time, he looks around. Everything is lit from the fire over which he’s suspended, and all around him are other body, sew just like his, to boards that angle them to roast, slow and painful, in the rising heat from the flames below.

As he looks, one of the bodies stirs, turning her head to look at him. She had beautiful eyes, and thin scars marking her right brow; her belly has been crudely carved open, allowing organs to distend out, drooling toward the blazing fire below.

“It hurts a lot the first time,” she says pleasantly. “But after the first few times the pain feels kind of nice.”

The Immortan wasn’t god, and in waking Nux believed that with all the conviction his fragile mind was capable of.

But the dreams… the dreams were their own world, where people played different roles.

"Do you know what your name means?" the Immortan snapped.

Nux's formerly agonized expression was now bewildered, the angle of his head keeping one narrowed, red-rimmed eye from view. “It’s a name," he gasped quietly. "It's only my name."

The Immortan moved slowly; Nux gasped again, lithe body straining against the board, trying to pull away, desperate to escape. There was a time when even a dream of the Immortan touching him like this would have been seen as a blessing; now it was just a terror.

“Nothing," the Immortan growled. "Latin." A ghostly expression of pleasure flitted across his face, as if he’d made a point. Nux, uncomprehending, writhed with a little whimpering noise, pressing upwards against the Immortan’s cold, sweat-sheened body.

Without warning, one huge hand clutched Nux's throat, hard, casually denting his windpipe. The human croaked, "I'm sorry - I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... interrupt..." A tear leaked out of one eye, and he turned his face away to hide it, useless as that was. The silent plea still hovered there between them: _stop stop please let me go just let me go_

This was one of the slow times, almost gentle. Joe wanted to talk, and when Joe wanted to talk, he took his time about it. It was sheer torment to wait as each moment was dragged out, and every minor interruption was greeted with a calm, cavalier infliction of pain. Not like when the Immortan was angry – when the Immortan was angry, the pain came constantly, so much sharper. But there was completion in the anger – fast, hard, screaming, bloody completion.

Anger was best. Anger was merely an expression of violent ecstasy, and ended quickly. This talkativeness, almost friendliness, this was how a cat played with a rat. This was how the Immortan reasserted his power, his ownership, his pure strength and terrible beauty. These were the times when the Immortan was once again God.

Nux bit his lip with a desperate conviction not to speak.

"Look at me," The Immortan said, slapping Nux hard across the face to make him turn his head. Nux met the cold blue eyes, clouded as they were with memory and formless passion.

"My name," Nux murmured, trembling, quick to show he was paying attention even as the larger body thrust languid and hard into a wound Nux supposed had been carved for this a purpose. "Latin."

The Immortan nodded, one hand drifting across Nux's bare chest, not quite touching. Nux bit back a hiss and realized with a fresh was of disgust, horror, and self-loathing, that he was hard again, as hard as he’d been with Slit.

"A Nux," The Immortan whispered, ghosting slender fingers down the young man’s sides, where dark violet bruises were already starting to bloom in the pale flesh. "A nut. Something of no value. Cheap. Worthless.”

Nux struggled to formulate a response, but was too desperate to think clearly. Want and horror were the only things his mind had room for - want, need, desire, ache, terror, disgust. The pain was almost unbearable.

"I like how you comply, Nux," said The Immortan, flashing a sudden, predatory smile that made Nux shiver. "You’re nothing, and you break so easily."

Then he was moving again, smooth and fast; but moving the wrong way, touching nothing of consequence. Within moments he was trembling with controlled release, completing himself but not Nux. With a few harsh, gasping breaths he regained his composure - and moved away. Nux couldn't help it; he let out a half-sobbing groan, the sudden emptiness rending him more thoroughly than any blade.


End file.
